The noose on digital music is finally being loosened in a
serious way. In addition to numerous legal music solutions
in the US, EMI announced "the biggest European music
download initiative," making over 140,000 paid tracks
available for download, burning and device porting. The
initiative represents another feather in OD2's cap whose
online music distribution platform is being used by over 20
music retail websites selling the EMI downloads from six
different European countries. This follows OD2's
self-congratulatory crowing on the success of its Digital
Download Day - "the biggest ever give-away of legal digital
music - with over 150,000 music files, ranking Christina Aguilera's
"Beautiful" as the most wanted download.

This trend will continue to grow as the recording industry
face consumer dissent and competition to their digital
plans. Solutions Research Group added to the evidence that
the industry's much-touted PR/education campaigns are not
winning the hearts & minds of their core customer base.
Instead, the media and entertainment consultancy found that
"a majority of young Canadians reject the notion that
downloading music and movies off the Internet can be equated
to physical theft."

But even if the recording industry were able to shift consumer
perception, there is no guarantee that MusicNet or OD2 would
be the main beneficiaries, as illustrated by the growing
number of artists jumping on the Kazaa bandwagon. The latest
collaboration was struck with Musicindie, a research and
development company for UK independent labels. The
initiative will provide Kazaa users with exclusive
pre-release singles from Cooking Vinyl's Richard Thompson
as well as tracks from Billy Bragg, Soft Cell and Ian
McCulloch using Altnet's TopSearch technology for secure
delivery. Independently of whether major labels eventually
decide to license significant portions of their catalogues
through Altnet's TopSearch, Kazaa's ability to provide a
legitimate delivery system could make it the next MP3.com of
the independent music community.